THE JEWISH EXILE THAT NEVER WAS!

USB 4 PAL GAA Article 01.29.10 The Jewish Exile that Never Was!THE JEWISH EXILE THAT NEVER WAS!By: Gulamhusein AbbaNote: Recently I submitted a piece by Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD to various editors and moderators forposting on their sites. In it Mazin stated, among other things,” The victimhood pathology startedrather early with the myth of the exodus from Egypt (archeologists and historians have longshown that this notion of enslavement in Egypt and redemption is simply not consistent with thefacts or the historical record)”.While some of the editors/moderators published the piece, several rejected it, claiming that Mazin’sstatement about “the myth of the exodus from Egypt” was unsubstantiated and unacceptable. That mademe evaluate the claim and the following article is the outcome of that research.***************Even more than the oft averred promise by God to the Jewish people, exile is central to theJewish claim on Palestine. Because they were exiled, they have a right to return. (Incidentally,this is precisely why the Zionists keep denying, in the face of overwhelming evidence to thecontrary, that the Palestinians were forced out of their homes and villages by the Zionists duringthe formation of an Israeli state. If they admit that they were forced out, they would have toadmit Palestinians’ right to return. But if the Palestinians, as the Zionists insist, left of their ownaccord, they have no such right!)The Jewish “exile” claim raises two questions. First: Even if they were exiled, and had a right toreturn, does that mean they have a right to claim Palestine, or a part of it, as a Jewish state?Second, the more important one: Were they in fact exiled from Palestine?Research scholars, several of them Jewish and some of them ardent Zionists, have been assertingfor quite some time that the claim of exile is a myth propagated by the Zionists.Dr.Mazin Qunsiyeh, PhD, recently wrote : “….archeologists and historians have long shown thatthis notion of enslavement in Egypt and redemption is simply not consistent with the facts or thehistorical record”.This is by no means a new or far fetched claim.Dissertations by Dr. Shlomo Sand and Jeremiah HaberDr. Shlomo Sand the author of “Invention of the Jewish People” and an expert on Europeanhistory at Tel Aviv University, has claimed in his book that "The Jews were never exiled fromthe Holy Land…. most of today’s Jews have no historical connection to the land called Israel”.His earlier book, “When and How Was The Jewish people Invented”, has been on Israel'sbestseller list for 19 weeks.Sand annotates what prompted him to write the book: "I started looking in researchstudies about the exile from the land - a constitutive event in Jewish history, almost likethe Holocaust. But to my astonishment I discovered that it has no literature. The reason isthat no one exiled the people of the country. The Romans did not exile peoples andthey could not have done so even if they had wanted to. They did not have trains andtrucks to deport entire populations. That kind of logistics did not exist until the 20thcentury. From this, in effect, the whole book was born: in the realization that Judaicsociety was not dispersed and was not exiled."The original Jews living in Israel, contrary to the propounded history, were not exiled. Sandargues that most of the Jews were not exiled by the Romans. They were permitted to remain inthe country.Sand suggests that the story of the exile was a myth promoted by early Christians to recruit Jewsto the new faith. They portrayed that event as a divine punishment imposed on the Jews forhaving rejected the Christian gospel. Sand writes that "Christians wanted later generations ofJews to believe that their ancestors had been exiled as a punishment from God."Elaborating further, Sand continues: "The supreme paradigm of exile was needed in order toconstruct a long-range memory in which an imagined and exiled nation-race was posited as thedirect continuation of 'the people of the Bible' that preceded it."Jeremiah Haber, an orthodox Zionist and a professor Jewish studies, writing under the nom deplume Jeremiah (Jerry) Haber, was critical of columnists like Charles Krauthammer and LeonardFein. In the July 29, 2007 issue of the Magnes Zionist, Jeremiah admonished the two columnistsfor accepting “the myth that the Jews were forcibly expelled from the Land of Israel, and takeninto captivity by the Romans.”Jeremiah went on to emphasize: “To this day, most lay people, Jews and non-Jews, accept themyth of the exile, whereas no historian, Jew or non-Jew, takes it seriously.” And to further detoxthe seemingly blind addiction to this myth, he presented two assertions: : “The first point tomake is that well before the revolt against Rome in 66-70 c.e., there were Jewish communitiesoutside Palestine, most notably in Babylonia and in Egypt, but elsewhere as well. References tothe dispersal of the Jewish people throughout the civilized world are found in the book of Esther,Josephus, and Philo. There is no indication that these communities were small, satellitecommunities.“Second, there is no contemporary evidence – i.e., 1st and 2nd centuries c.e. – that anything likean exile took place. The Romans put down two Jewish revolts in 66-70 c.e. and in 132-135 c.e.According to Josephus, the rebels were killed, and many of the Jews died of hunger. Someprisoners were sent to Rome, and others were sold in Libya. But nowhere does Josephus speak ofJews being taken into exile. As we shall see below, there is much evidence to the contrary. Therewas always Jewish emigration from the Land of Israel…..”.Similarly, in a post dated March 25, 2008 of the Jews Sans Frontieres, it was claimed that thereare “a couple of pervasive racial myths upon which Zionism is founded. One is that of exile andthe other is that of the common origin of the Jewish people…”Yet another learned critic of the Jewish Exile is Israel Jacob Yuval, director of theInterdisciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies, Backenroth Senior Lecturer in MedievalJewish Studies. In his book, The Myth of the Jewish Exile from the Land of Israel: ADemonstration of Irenic Scholarship, Jacob Yuval extended his sincere empathy to thePalestinians. “On the one hand, I am a Zionist loyal to awareness of the need for the existence ofthe State of Israel. On the other hand, I am deeply troubled by the price paid by the Palestiniansfor the fulfillment of this dream. Like many others, I desperately seek a fair solution that willminimize the pain and suffering for both sides”All this leads one to ask by whom was this myth of exile concocted and why?As already stated, the suggestion made by Sand is that the story of the exile was a mythpromoted by early Christians to recruit Jews to the new faith.This myth suited the Zionists exceedingly well.Jerry Haber, in his post dated July 29, 2007, suggests that though the myth was notinvented by the Zionists, they dropped the “punishment” part and used it and nurturedit, “in part, to justify the return of the Jews to their ancestral homeland. For the tacitassumption of the Zionists was that if the Jews had left the land willingly, if they hadmerely ‘emigrated’ because they found opportunities beckoning in the Diaspora, thenthey would have betrayed their allegiance to the land, and their return would havebeen less justified….. it (the myth)dovetailed nicely with the historical view of thewandering Jew that finds no rest outside of his native place from which he wasexpelled”.In Sand's view, at a certain stage in the 19th century, intellectuals of Jewish origin inGermany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took uponthemselves the task of inventing a people "retrospectively," out of a thirst to create amodern Jewish people. From historian Heinrich Graetz on, Jewish historians began todraw the history of Judaism as the history of a nation that had been a kingdom,became a wandering people and ultimately turned around and went back to itsbirthplace.The third chapter of Sand’s book “The Invention of the Diaspora” starts with thequotation from the preamble to the Israeli Declaration of Independence: "After beingforcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it throughout theirDispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for therestoration in it of their political freedom" As we have seen, Sand argues that theJewish people's exile from its land never happened.Sand goes on to state that the description of the Jews as a wandering and self-isolatingnation of exiles, "who wandered across seas and continents, reached the ends of theearth and finally, with the advent of Zionism, made a U-turn and returned en masse totheir orphaned homeland," is nothing but"national mythology." Like other national movements in Europe, which sought out asplendid Golden Age, through which they invented a heroic past - for example,classical Greece or the Teutonic tribes - to prove they have existed since the beginningsof history, "so, too, the first buds of Jewish nationalism blossomed in the direction of thestrong light that has its source in the mythical Kingdom of David."Sand asserts: “Zionism changed the idea of Jerusalem. Before, the holy places wereseen as places to long for, not to be lived in. For 2,000 years Jews stayed away fromJerusalem not because they could not return but because their religion forbade themfrom returning until the messiah came.”These revelations about the oft asserted exile of the Jews being a myth are indeedrevealing and shocking. They completely demolish the Jewish claim of their right toreturn to the Holy Land. But this is not all. Modern researchers and historians go further.They claim that the Jews never existed as a nation and that the vast majority of the presentday Jews have no connection to the Biblical Jews or the Biblical Holy Land.But that is another story. (Please watch for: “Was there a Jewish nation?”)